


Reaching out

by Cactusepique



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Insecurities, Post-Episode: 2015 Xmas The Husbands of River Song, Telepathy, complicated relationship, smut with feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-05
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-11 20:53:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5641567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cactusepique/pseuds/Cactusepique
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"“I don’t want it,” he began and she gasped, told herself it was an incomplete statement. There was a way that sentence needed to finish, a declaration of love, need and want hanging between their bodies, flushed against one another. Otherwise his touch would be a lie."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reaching out

“Do you want it?” she asked, a hand on either end of his tie. (He didn’t wear a bowtie anymore, but he still dressed up for her.) “Do you really want it?” she asked again, his hands finding the zip of her dress and pulling it down. _Do you want me?_ (The question remained unspoken). 

“I don’t want it,” he began and she gasped, told herself it was an incomplete statement. There was a way that sentence needed to finish, a declaration of love, need and want hanging between their bodies, flushed against one another. Otherwise his touch would be a lie. The way his digits were tracing her spine, pressing lightly on her vertebras, counting them (if the look of utter focus on his face and the slowness of his touch were anything to go by). The way his hands were now pushing the fabric of her dress out of the way, not quite letting it slip away from her shoulders and reveal her chest, but baring more of the skin of her back to his touch. All of it would be a lie. 

His hands settled momentarily at her hips, but then his fingers were curling around hers, locking their hands together. “It’s you,” he whispered quietly, with the same tenderness he’d delivered her catchphrase earlier that day. “You made me want this.” 

She swallowed hard, avoiding his gaze, too warm and loving. She thought she didn’t deserve this; his selflessness, his caring and devotion. She felt weak, she felt needy, and she hated herself for all of it. Hated herself for making him feel he had to do this to make her happy, and she hated herself even more because she wanted it anyway. She wanted a kiss; she wanted it soft, slow, decisive or rough and hurried. She wanted it in any way possible. She wanted his lips and his hands on her. 

And even more. 

“It’s okay,” she breathed, “you don’t have to do this.” 

He dug his nails into the back of her hand; hurt, ashamed, angry, something in between the three. 

“How can you not know?” he finally said, a little smile tugging at his thin lips, firm and soft. “I’m not doing this out of duty, shame or guilt,” he continued, “not because I believe a husband owes this to his wife.” His hands cupped her face, gently prompting her into meeting his eyes. “And for a while I was perfectly fine with holding your hands, telling you stories, taking you to parties and making pillow forts with you,” he spoke as his thumb caressed her cheeks. “But then you were becoming special for me, and I wanted more.” 

He pressed his head into her neck. “River,” he said. Nothing more. She wanted to set her skin on fire, smoke it out in a new regeneration she wasn’t capable of. She wanted to try a new one, one that didn’t feel so tight, a heart that didn’t feel so heavy. 

“River,” he said again, his voice rough. “I’m not a monolith,” he stated and there was the ghost of a laugh in his voice. “This kind of intimacy, this whole sex thing,” he said with the same calm, collected voice he’d use to explain the internal working of the TARDIS, but his voice wavered and he took a deep breath. “It’s a conversation. A game. An experiment. A statement. This is me telling you,” he choked out and his voice broke. 

He kissed her then and she didn’t push the matter. (They have time. Twenty-four years. A third of an average 21th century human life.) He was tentative at first, not nearly enough of what she wanted from him. She opened her mouth, moaned her approval when he took her hint and deepened the kiss. His hands threaded themselves through her hair. Rough, strong, the sting perfect, the sensation reverberating all the way down her body. She gasped into his mouth and it seemed to awaken something in him. 

Long lost memories. 

“How long has it been?” she asked when they broke apart. “How long has it been since you last saw me?” 

“Don’t think about it,” he whispered. “I’ll tell you everything,” he said as his hands undressed her, letting her dress hang loosely on her hips, hugging her curves. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and his mouth pressed hot kisses against her skin, eliciting a choke of pleasure from her. “I’ll tell you everything later.” 

_Later_. After this. Him, her and that bed waiting for them. Somewhere in between then and the inevitable sunrise.

Her dress fell to the floor, leaving her naked and she removed her heels (he didn’t react, didn’t seem to have a kink for those anymore). His hands were in her hair again, letting it fall freely on her shoulders. They were kissing again, and she slid her fingers in his soft, wonderful curls, pulling just a little, making him groan and letting him know how much she liked his blatant arousal as his hips bucked against her. 

He guided her hands to the buttons of his shirt, shrugged off his jacket. She removed his tie, but her fingers were nervous, clumsy. (This wasn’t right. She loved sex; the art and the act. The sensual dance of action and response, swirling together in an infinite continuity. The tastes, the smells, the way the bodies moved against each other. She was good, skilled and shameless, she wasn’t a school girl having her first time with her crush. But then it was him, and it hadn’t been him in a very long while.). She resumed undressing him, but she could count the breathes between each unfastening and she huffed in annoyance, cursing herself for being such a sentimental idiot ( _just like I am_ , his eyes seemed to say). Her touch grew harder, faster and finally, he was completely naked before her. 

She had forgotten the next step. There had always been a pattern, a method with his younger, eleventh self. Always a bloody method. But she had missed it afterwards, when it hadn’t been him. It was a structure, like a reassuring narrative. Always the same, unchanged, predictable. She had always been the one leading. (She suddenly realized this wasn’t true anymore.) His hands roamed her body confidently, proving her wrong, and he pushed her down on the bed. 

“The first time,” she said, “the first time it wasn’t you –after my first time with you,” she added when he frowned in confusion. “He didn’t start with a kiss, didn’t start with his tie and shirt. He started with his trousers. He didn’t –He didn’t talk, didn’t kiss me first. So I told him to stop.” She tried to laugh, but it came out wrong. (The second time, it had been a woman, and she had let her, she had forgotten the pattern. She had enjoyed it. Then she hadn’t cared anymore.)

He pressed his forehead to hers, hovering above her, and she was suddenly overwhelmed by raw memories and images. _A woman with icy blue eyes and dark, beautiful mahogany hair. His hands finding the laces of a white corset. The joyful sense of triumph at her submission. A mistake. Then a younger woman, kinder, too good for him. He didn’t remember her face. He remembered he loved her._

She didn’t even feel betrayed or cheated on. Not when he’d agreed to an open relationship ages ago, only showing hint of jealousy recently. (But she’d been ignoring him then, seeing right through him.) Not when he was so gloriously pressed up against her, naked and shuddering and vulnerable. _Very much not a monolith_. Not when his gaze on her was telling her he needed her more than anything else in this moment. Not when she could feel proud at the way he looked at her. _The sunset admiring her back_. 

She remembered the pattern now. Undressing (Bowtie always first, then jacket and shirt). Warming up, preliminary. Her, always first, then him. Sometimes that had been it and nothing more. And other times there had been more. Always her on top, his grip bruising her hips. 

Cuddling afterwards. 

That pattern wasn’t eccentric, but his stubborn insistence to follow it to the letter had always upset her. Once, she had tried to push him into the TARDIS’s console, opening his trousers and going down on him without so much of a warning. He’d pushed her away with a strange gasp and avoided even her casual, innocent touch for days. 

“Forget about the pattern”, he whispered, his mind hovering above hers, following her thought process, tracking down the flicker of her feelings (Joy, love, expectation), not quite yet entering her mind, always afraid of such proximity. 

It seemed he remembered how to touch her like it had only been yesterday, even if she suspected it had been centuries since they had been together for the last time in his perspective. At least she was fairly certain it was his first time meeting her in his current incarnation. His fingers were between her thights, teasing and worshipping the soft, delicate flesh he’d found there. She wriggled above him, his fingers circling her entrance, not quite entering her. She bit back a whimper and a threat, and he laughed openly, his smile brighter than the sun, and she couldn’t help but smile back at him. She curled up around him, his hands ghosting over her thights as he lay back on the bed, watching her with silent fascination and want – looking up at her like he couldn’t quite believe she was there with him. 

He let her take control (he always had), as much at her mercy as she was at his. She slid down onto him, reveling in the gasp of pleasure that escaped his lips –low, soft, lost and helpless. “What do you think, then?” he still managed to ask in a ragged breath, “my new body?” She laughed this time, still moving slowly, still adjusting, memorizing the feeling of him inside her. 

“You’re everything I though I’d lost the right to claim mine.” 

“Manhattan?” 

“Yes,” she said, moving more firmly against him, increasing her speed and deepening their tenuous telepathic bond, willing him to understand she wouldn’t talk about it, not yet. (How they had drifted away from each other after Manhattan. Her incapacity to let him in. Him shutting himself off, lost in his regrets and his grief, unable to give her the comfort she desperately longed for but wouldn’t have asked him to give her.)

He pushed himself up, his teeth grazing her collarbone, her nipples. He cursed under his breath, a novelty she found rather attractive (his younger self had always been babbling about everything and anything, even during sex). She was trying (god, she was trying) to hold back herself, but then his talented fingers found her clit, coaxing her into orgasm and she cried out. 

She had barely time to catch her breath before he kissed her –hard and fiercely. His mind was slipping inside hers now, knitting itself with a low hum into the complexity of her thought patterns. He cradled her mind in his own as much as his body was now cradling her, limp and pleasure-washed. His own lust was filling hers, echoing her own want. She wanted to laugh at how much he was pleased with himself as she was left gasping and shuddering, reaching for him with trembling hands. His previous-self had never forged such a deep telepathic bond with her, never let her see his thoughts and emotions, never let her feel how much he loved her.

 _I was scared,_ his voice answered her inarticulate question inside her head. _Scared of letting you too close and then losing you. Scared of what you might have found inside my mind, even if you knew, had always known, that I’m not a good man. Scared you’d stop loving me if I let you see me properly…there’s terrifying things inside my mind River, and probably a few more spoilers for you…I shouldn’t tell you that, but I trust you not to look. Never to look._

She didn’t answer and he withdrew completely from her mind. The sudden emptiness left her whimpering. (But she knew such strong bonds were dangerous, even more if there were maintained for more than a few, precious seconds). 

“Wait,” she said, realizing he’d slipped out of her, still hard, now pressing up against her thight, “you didn’t– you didn’t come.” 

He smirked at that, and maneuvered her slowly, carefully onto her back, finding his place between her thighs. He kissed her, again, again and again until she was driven half crazy. Then finally (just when she’d resolved herself to beg, although River Song never begged), he entered her slowly, pushing against her, making breathy, undone sounds. She was letting out high, gasping moans, a chill running up her spine, shuddering under him, tender and hypersensitive from her recent orgasm. (She didn’t care, and as he fucked her slowly onto the mattress, she felt like she was falling in love with him again.)

“Come in me,” she panted, his breathing hard and ragged against her collarbone. 

He was a new man, a new husband, but yet, when he curled around her afterwards, protective and tender, drawing circles onto her skin until she stopped trembling –ever so gentle, smug but almost surprised by what had just happened– she recognized those moves from a hundred years ago.


End file.
